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Historians believe William Shakespeare was born on this day, April 23, in 1564—the same day he died in 1616.

Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, on April 26, 1564. At age 18, he married Anne Hathaway, and the couple had a daughter in 1583 and twins in 1585. Sometime later, Shakespeare set off to become an actor and by 1592 was well established in London’s theatrical world as both a performer and a playwright. His earliest plays, including The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, were written in the early 1590s. Later in the decade, he wrote tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet (1594–1595) and comedies including The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597). His greatest tragedies were written after 1600, including Hamlet (1600–01), Othello (1604–05), King Lear (1605–06), and Macbeth (1605–1606).

Shakespeare became a member of the popular theater company named “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” who later became the “King’s Men.” The group was responsible for building and operating the famous Globe Theater in 1599. Though widely known for his literature, Shakespeare was also a sound businessman, ultimately becoming a major shareholder in the troupe. His investments earned him enough to buy a large house in Stratford in 1597, where he retired in 1610 and wrote his last plays including The Tempest (1611) and The Winter’s Tale (1610–11). Despite his prolific work ethic, no formal collections of his works were published until after his death. In 1623, two members of Shakespeare’s troupe collected the plays and printed what is now called the First Folio.

Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life. —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Letters and Social Aims

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April 2016 Marks the 20th Anniversary of National Poetry Month

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.” – Thomas Hardy

Join us as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month. Since its induction, National Poetry Month has grown to become one of the largest celebrations of literature nationwide, supported by avid poetry enthusiasts, schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets alike.

The Academy of American Poets first established National Poetry Month in 1996. Since its conception, the Academy of American Poets has enlisted a variety of government agencies and officials as well as educational leaders, publishers, sponsors, poets, and arts organizations. National Poetry Month has become a trademark of the Academy of American Poets.

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle

So grab your favorite collection of poems and quote a line to your spouse or wrestle the kids down and read a poem aloud to them. Let’s revel in the joy of poetry this April.

Here are some suggestions—each title below received The Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry awarded by Mercer University Press.

“Glory to the half rest, to the breath between
the third and fourth beats,
the dwindling arrow of the decrescendo,
to the sunrise over Malibu, and its sleeping starlets,
the empty horizon,
the city’s great thought still looming,
to parked cars, the cold engine seconds before ignition
dreaming of the road
unwound and endless,….”

International Cherry Blossom Festival

Macon, Georgia — March 17–April 3, 2016

Spring is now here, as the days are getting longer and warmer. The birds are chirping and the bees are buzzing and dancing until they find a blossom on which to land. Along with the season of rebirth comes the 24th Annual International Cherry Blossom Festival in Macon, Georgia.

Each March, Macon becomes a pink, cotton-spun paradise when 300,000 Yoshino cherry trees bloom in all their glory. For ten days, festival-lovers are treated to one of the most extravagant displays of springtime color in the nation as they visit the Cherry Blossom Capital of the World.

The story begins when William A. Fickling Sr., a local realtor, discovered the first Yoshino cherry tree in Macon while strolling about in his backyard. The year was 1949. Thanks to Fickling’s propagating efforts, thousands of trees have since been planted around Macon. The idea of a Cherry Blossom Festival didn’t take root until one day at a company picnic Fickling spoke to a woman named Carolyn Crayton after admiring the Yoshino’s unique beauty. While discussing the trees, Carolyn came up with an idea.

“I shared with him a dream of mine, one where the entire town was bursting with thousands of the graceful pink cherry trees. I asked if he would donate trees to plant in my neighborhood of Wesleyan Woods, and he generously agreed, helping my dream become a reality,” said the future festival founder.

To start the project, Fickling agreed to donate the trees if Crayton would organize the planting. In a community wide effort, families, companies, and volunteers began planting what would eventually add up to 500 Yoshino cherry trees by 1973. Macon was now blossoming pink every March.

As executive director of the Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful Commission, Crayton proposed officially launching a Cherry Blossom Festival in celebration of the beauty of the trees and also to honor Fickling for his contributions.

In 1982, the International Cherry Blossom Festival was born, which was built on three basic principles—love, beauty, and international friendship.

Since it’s grassroots beginnings, the festival has become one of the Top 20 Events in the South, Top 50 Events in the US, and Top 100 Events in North America. The festival has since expanded from thirty events over three days to a month-long celebration featuring hundreds of events entertaining people of all ages and backgrounds.

In 2014, Mercer University Press published a history of the festival entitled The Pinkest Party on Earth: Macon, Georgia’s International Cherry Blossom Festival written by Ed Grisamore, award-winning author and then columnist for The Macon Telegraph.

The 34th Annual International Cherry Blossom Festival is now underway. For additional information, visit their website or contact the Festival Headquarters at 478-330-7050.https://www.cherryblossom.com/

Spring will arrive early this year, due to a quirky leap year in 2016. Have you noticed that the equinox used to happen on March 21st? This year, depending on your time zone in the northern hemisphere, Spring will begin on either the 19th or the 20th of March.

As it turns out, that extra day in February has consequences beyond making it hard to plan a birthday party. But let’s backtrack to the year 2000. The year 2000 marked the first time in four centuries a year divisible by 100 didn’t skip the leap year. In other words, a February 29 did occur in 2000 and it was the first century year with a leap day since Galileo was peering into a vertically angled telescope.

Now we won’t get into the nitty gritty of our Gregorian Calendar, but basically in our calendar system if a year is divisible by 400, only then will it be a leap year.

The consequence of that little move will affect us during this next month. Because 2000 was an unorthodox year for us, solstices and equinoxes began to occur earlier and earlier. The usual century leap year prevented the calendar from jumping back.

In case you haven’t noticed, Spring began on March 21 when you were little, but it’s been falling on the 20th for some years now. This year, the first day of Spring will fall on the 19th of March for most US time zones.

This means 2016 will have the earliest Spring since 1896! Later this century, Spring will begin on the 19th of March every year. Then, the next glitch won’t occur until February 29, 4000.

How does it feel to experience history?

Oh, and don’t forget to “Spring” forward this Sunday, March 13th, at 2:00 am—as most of the US changes the clock an hour ahead for Daylight Savings Time.

For Those of You Who Want a Little More Background…
The numbers of days in a year aren’t even, but you knew that already. Our calendar system adds one day every fourth year to accommodate this fact. But, because Earth spins a little less than 365 ¼ times per year, we must rid the calendar of that extra once-every-four-year day, and that’s what will happen again in the year 4000.

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Mercer University Press Celebrates Women’s History Month

Women’s History Month first gained a national stage in 1981 when Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28, both authorizing and requesting that the President proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982 as Women’s History Week. Throughout the next five years, Congress continued to pass joint resolutions designating a week in March as Women’s History Week. The National Women’s History Project petitioned for the month of March to be dedicated to Women’s History. Congress passed Pub. L. 100-9 which designated the month of March 1987 as Women’s History Month. Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to dedicate March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as Women’s History Month.

Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday February 12

On this day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky.

Today we celebrate the birthday of one of America’s most admired presidents, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was born into a poor family in Kentucky.
Lincoln was the tallest president at 6′ 4 with record physical strength. He was a formidable wrestler in Illinois. Lincoln went on to become infamous for his dry humor and wit. After frustrating defeat after another Lincoln reportedly wrote to a general “if you are not using the army I should like to borrow it for awhile.” Lincoln was also an avid animal lover throughout his lifetime once saying “I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”

He attended school for only one year, but even as a child Abraham was a voracious reader constantly striving to improve is mind. As an adult, he lived in Illinois bouncing from job to job before entering politics. Many people are unaware of the fact that Lincoln didn’t begin his journey in politics. Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, was also a postmaster, surveyor and shopkeeper. After this small chapter in his life Lincoln went on to pursue politics.

Before the presidency Lincoln served in the Illinois legislature from 1834 to 1836, and then became an attorney. In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd; and had four sons. Lincoln returned to politics during the 1850s, when disagreements over slavery began to escalate. Lincoln proposed a restriction of slavery to the states where it existed. As president on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

That Rembrandt was a believer is an undoubted fact of his life; that he was not a practicing member of any Church is also a fact of his life. Rembrandt grew up in a Protestant (Dutch Reformed) home in Leiden, a town famous for science and, in some circles, for its hospitality (in 1608 and much of the decade following) to some of the Pilgrim fathers. His father Harmen’s upbringing was Roman Catholic, but by the time of his marriage to Rembrandt’s mother Cornelia, Harmen had joined the Dutch Reformed Church. Cornelia (Neeltje) was brought up Roman Catholic, but by the time she and Harmen were married (on October 8, 1589) in the Dutch Reform Pieterskerk in Leiden, she too had obviously left Catholicism for Protestantism.

In 1631, in his twenty-fifth year, Rembrandt painted an elderly woman reading a great heavy Bible—though he may have intended to depict a biblical figure (Anna from Luke 2:36–38 has often been named.) I believe he was thinking of his mother, whom he had no doubt often seen with the Bible open on her lap. The painting was done with obvious affection; Neeltje would have been around sixty-three when the work was created.

Though we have no firm record of Rembrandt’s birth, the date customarily listed is July 15, 1606, from a reference in a history of Leiden by the city’s mayor, J. J. Orlers. By that date, his parents had been married for around twenty-seven years; Rembrandt was the ninth of ten children born to Harmen and Neeltje. Three of the ten died at birth, two before Rembrandt’s arrival, the third when he was three years old.

That Rembrandt was drawn to the Bible as a source for his art is an inevitable result of his family life, his instruction at Leiden’s Calvinist “Latin School” from the ages of seven to fourteen, and above all from his guidance at the hand and eye of Pieter Lastman, the great “history painter” in Amsterdam. Yet if no piece of this evidence was available to us, we would be forced to remember Rembrandt as very much the painter of the Bible by the predominance in his drawings and in his etchings and in his paintings of biblical persons, biblical themes, and especially of biblical moments. No serious study of the life and work of Rembrandt known to me fails to take note of this fact, not least because so large a percentage of the legacy he has left to us, around one-third by general estimate, is devoted to the Bible. “An old Bible” is listed among Rembrandt’s possession in the bankruptcy inventory of 1656, and following his death on October 5, 1669, the only book among his possessions “in the inner chamber” was a Bible. That he lived with the Bible right through his life cannot be contested; thus what can be said about the Bible in Rembrandt’s belief?

To put it in simplest terms, Rembrandt’s belief, his faith, came not from any connection with a church, and not from any appropriation of a doctrinal system. He was friendly with a considerable array of religious persons, both humble and grand: Protestants, of course, even Mennonite Protestants, but also Catholic and Jewish figures. He was commissioned to paint their portraits, to illustrate some of their publications, and to create works decorating their homes and meeting places (but never their places of worship: Protestants and Jews objected to images in their places of worship, and Roman Catholics felt that Rembrandt’s works were not religious enough, and even sometimes sacrilegious).

Rembrandt’s believing was therefore a biblical believing. The Bible was for him a real book more than it was a holy book. Its heroes and heroines were real people, people who made real mistakes and were sorry for it, not saints above temptation and reproach and criticism. To model Jesus, he picked a Jew; to represent Judas, he depicted a painfully regretful traitor who had torn out his hair in distress; to help us know religious hypocrisy and pomp, he painted Temple officials far more interested in the coins Judas had thrown down than in a man in deep grief.

Rembrandt’s Tobit is both unjustly irritated at his good wife and fumblingly blind. Rembrandt’s Balaam is so caught up in his own self-defensive fury that he overlooks the fact that he is having a conversation with a she-ass. Rembrandt’s prodigal son is caught up in the healing hug of a father whose love is rooted in caring instead of in self-justification and judgment. Rembrandt’s Mary at the Tomb on Easter morning is so human that, in spite of all she had witnessed, she assumes the risen Christ must be a gardener.

I think Rembrandt began his biblical works as works of illustration, attempts to picture what the words of the Bible’s text suggested. Before the passing of many years, however, Rembrandt began interpreting the words of that text, giving us an exegesis of what he felt the words may mean. And in his maturity as a biblical artist, Rembrandt created what must be called works of confession, moving statements of his own belief, in particular the famous “Hundred Guilder Print,” an astonishing summary of the entire nineteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. It is a sermon on an etching plate that presents Jesus healing theological, psychological, and physical sickness and dealing at the same time with legalism, the pride of self-importance, and the reality of indifference. And not even the “rich young man” or the proverbial camel of Matthew 19 are left out!

I have been looking at Rembrandt looking me into looking for many years now; yet as I keep on looking, I find myself seeing more and more, because Rembrandt, it turns out, teaches the Bible without prejudice, and gives us human genius mixed with divine love.

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It’s time for fireworks and grilling out and nothing goes better with the festivities like in-depth academic examinations of literature, American history, Christianity, Kierkegaard, African-American history, politics, and theology. The mental stimulation just makes the cole slaw taste sooooo much better.

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In addition to celebrating the birth of our nation today, we also celebrate the contributions of country music to American culture. Far more than bemoaning the loss of a trailer, a wife, and a dog, country music provides voice to an entire worldview, both secular and religious. Read more about the explicit and implicit theologies of country music in David Fillingim’s Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology. It makes a great read beneath the glow of fireworks.

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